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You know…one of the links that I used on my last posting, about Wii Sports, gave an overall fair review of the game but the reviewer couldn’t help but ‘dis the graphics. He said that they were too simple, and almost primitive. I guess he forgot that the main thing about any game is its playability – not how “real” it looks or acts.

Today, I turned on the TV to watch “tech tv”, to see if there was anything worth watching. They were reporting from the GDC (Game Developers Conference) and one of the things that they were excited to show us was the latest preview for a new game that was coming out soon… Gears of War 2 for the X-box – and I purposely did not put a link to it… Find it yourself if you wish…

The crux of the commercial was two graphic “warriors” armed, obviously to the teeth, with at least one of them carry what looked like a cross between the ultimate rifle and a chainsaw on steroids. The colors were basically flowing shades of blood red and the two characters were essentially fighting almost hand to hand.

As it is a “quick” preview, the fight quickly ends and the apparent “winner” turns his back. At that moment the other “downed” warrior picks up his chainsaw/rifle and rips out the back of his competitor with appropriate fluids flying… All I could say was what the %$##@!!!!

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Ever since I saw the first Atari 2600 video game for the home, I’ve wanted a video game.

Unfortunately we always had “higher” priorities for the household budget. Eventually I discovered computers (for which I squirreled away my pennies at a time until I could afford one. To be truthful, I actually got a credit card dedicated for my computer habit. It lasted for years and my computers kept me busy enough to “ignore” the video games that were coming out.

To be truthful, my youngest daughter actually acquired several old game consoles from either neighbors or garage sales and I did enjoy getting beat by her whenever we played one of her Sonic or car race games. Man she’s a pretty tough competitor ( would like to think that she gets that from her old man…)

I guess it really should not have been a surprise for me then, when she hooked up with a boyfriend who also liked Video games and had himself a Wii. What was a real big surprise was that my wife actually bought me one for our anniversary!

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First off let me apologize to everyone, for my being off the air for so long!

Part of the issue was almost back to back holidays. We didn’t plan it that way, but that’s the way it happened. The first holiday was a spontaneous “get away”, just to shake out the stuff that had been accumulating between our ears – that took about a week <grin>.

The second holiday happened due more to coincidence than intentional timing. Our daughter, is a professional singer and frequently accepts contracts to entertain on cruise ships. The current ship was the Westerdam on Holland America.

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I would like to apologize for the lack of recent postings this last week or so.

I seem to have developed an “issue” with WordPress right now. It is giving me a bit of grief when it comes to writing a post. Whenever I try to add a link I get a blank window instead of an insert window prompting me for the link information. As a result it has dramatically slowed down my writing process.

I like to write the article on-line instead of separately, and I like to add links as I go, but right now to add a link I have to go into the actual source code and enter it manually – which isn’t what I consider fun PLUS it ruins my train of thought (which of course  results in a bit of a wrecked document causing me to start over.)

I know WordPress has released a couple of new upgrades, and I will be trying those out as well as investigating as to whether it is Java, Firefox, Internet Explorer, or all or none of them. So again my apologies and of course, once I get it fixed, you’ll be the first to know…

Well here we were off on a wonderful weeks vacation, with our lap under arm looking forward to a week of snow, catching up on some great books, watching movies and the finale of a great series that we had been watching called “Tenko”.

Tenko is a 3 year mini series (10 episodes per year) focused on the British women who were interred in Malaysia by the Japanese during World War II. The reason you may not have ever heard of it is because it was produced in the 1980’s and from what my research showed me, it was only available on DVD in PAL format which is incompatible in North America.

We were loaned a copy of the series from a friend who had recorded them on disk in a compressed AVI format, or Audio Video Interleave, which played quite well in our DVD player which had the capability to play AVI and DivX, content.

It is an amazing and insightful series and we only had the last disk left when we left on holiday. I seemed to have always been able to review and playback AVI files on my main computer and since we had at least Since I have been able to watch various AVI files on my main computer and since I had at least three different DVD players as well as media players on our laptop I “assumed” that everthing would work fine – that’s right – I didn’t test it before we left… which lucky for you – leads to this article.

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